Or the chicken and egg problem when attempting to restore a corrupted model database as it was presented by my MCM colleague Gail Shaw the other day in our MCM discussion group. This is the case he presented us with: Hi all Something I’ve been puzzling over recently. Restore database appears to need...

For those of you who may not be familiarized with this object, sys.dm_db_index_usage_stats is one of the many Dynamic Management Views built into SQL Server. This one specifically falls into the category index related DMVs , and it returns counts of different types (scans, seeks, and lookups) of index...

Under normal circumstances, once there is no one referencing any object from a database whose AUTO_CLOSE option is enabled, the database manager would attempt to close it (with the exception of master, tempdb and model system databases). But if you want a given instance of SQL Server to simply skip closing...

As you may know from having read the documentation, whitepapers, or personal synthetic experiments, SQL Server’s Storage Engine supports a performance optimization mechanism named read-ahead (RA for short). Its aim is anticipating the data and index pages needed to fulfill a query execution plan and...

Imagine, for example, that you run DBCC TRACEON(1117, -1) to globally enable trace flag 1117 on an instance of SQL Server 2005, where it had no effect because nowhere in the Database Engine’s code honored such flag. We could then say trace flag 1117 was in a “reserved for future use”...

As you may have noticed, it has been written about Trace Flag 1117 in various blogs, and the general guidance they all provide is to enable it, particularly for SAP and Dynamics . However one might ask itself the question: In which circumstances, if any, would it be better not to enable it? The answer...